Guy Who Doesn’t Usually Like Country Really Likes Band That Isn’t Actually Country

August 16, 2011 by C.M. Wilcox

Fresh off a Gloriana concert at the county fair last night, local pop music fan Jeffery Schmidt is excited to dive headlong into the world of country music.

“I’ve always dismissed country because I thought it was all corny backwoods stuff, with the fiddles and banjos and songs about beer and dogs. But all of Gloriana’s show was really upbeat and peppy. Even though the one guy was strumming a banjo on some songs, I don’t think he even had it plugged in. It was almost like seeing Selena Gomez.”

“I went into the show pretty much hating country, but Gloriana absolutely won me over,” Schmidt added, imagining that he was offering proof of musical quality rather than a sad indication of how completely country music has forsaken its own identity to appeal to out-of-genre fans just like himself. “Now I’ve been wearing my little cowboy hat [purchased at the show for $25] everywhere and telling people they should listen to country music because it’s really good and probably not what they’re thinking. It’s young and hip and actually sounds a lot like Madonna. My friends are already joking that I’m ‘Mr. Country’ now.”

Contacted by email, Gloriana’s Tom Gossin was excited to hear of his band’s part in Schmidt’s conversion.

“As big fans of country ourselves, we’re so proud to be winning people over on behalf of the genre. If we can be the gateway – if people start listening to us and it leads them to honky tonk legends like Meryl Hagard or Jimmy Paycheck or the Eagles – we feel like we’ve done our job. We listen to lots of Meryl on the bus, but at the same time, she’s right next to Clay Aiken and Rihanna on my iPod, you know? We just love music.”

Gossin added that the band’s next album will have “more of a gritty, traditional country flavor” to it. Dann Huff is producing.

Comments

I like boobies. I know this isn’t relevant to the tall tale which was spun here, but while reading my mind sort of drifted off and floated away into boobyland. Speaking of which, I turned off country radio a few years ago when every song that was played was either carrie underwood overpowering my ears with the same song over and over or Jason Aldean and every other poopy head like him spouting the same tired lyrics about trucks and beer and tractors and how American and red-neck and country they were, in the most pansy-assed way imaginable.

The fact that your mind driffed to “booby land” is just one more way that shows how country music has been corrupted. If you have watched CMT lately, then you have probably seen that most all of the female artists that are rising on the charts are more sex icons than vocalists. Sad but true. I personally like country music from a time era when the lyrics of a song actually said something and the people preforming the songs would sing them, not scream them.

Jeffery represents about 50% or more of the young people digging the pop-rock stuff on Top 40 AirHead Country radio these days. There is no “hard core / real country” to upset their pop rock sensibilities, so they thrive on Rascal Flatts, and Carrie Underwood, and Taylor Swift to their heart’s content and tolerate the occasional Alan Jackson and George Strait song.

What “The Onion” is to politics and pop-culture, “Fake News” is to the greater country music realm in terms of knowing, well informed satirical humor. Now if you could just land a beer sponsorship….

Trackbacks

[…] Here’s a new edition of Quotable Country. Also, Country California has been killing it lately: check out their hilarious new article, “Guy Who Doesn’t Usually Like Country Really Likes Band That Isn’t Actually Countr… […]

What was Country California?

A smart, satirical take on the modern country music landscape published continuously from April 2008 to November 2015.